Misdirection
by Tommy Stevens
Summary: An attempt to flesh out the character of Gwen Stacy, and hopefully a good story as well. This is the Gwen, Peter Parker and Captain Stacy that appeared in the comic books, so it takes place in the late sixties and has the characterizations of that period.
1. When Did We Break Up?

"I know you'll leave me sooner or later. Everyone does. Just get it over with," Gwen said as she ran out of Peter Parker's apartment crying.

"Aw, nuts," Peter thought. " I just wanted a nice evening alone with Gwendy, the two of us, her new Simon and Garfunkel album playing in the background, maybe a little wine, definitely a little kissing, but my Spider-sense had to go off. I guess telling her I just remembered I'd promised to tutor at ESU tonight was a pretty weak story, but what was that all about? "

"Stupid Spider-sense." Peter shot a line out of the window and swung away. " Why can't I just be like everyone else. Everyone else worries about 6 AM alarm clocks waking them up for early classes. I have to worry about this tingling in my head every time somethimg goes wrong." Spider-Man looked down and saw what had ruined his evening. "Even if it's just a bunch of losers breaking into a pawn shop."

"Look out, It's Spider-Man. Forget the loot and run!"

"You should have forgotten the loot a few hours ago. Then we'd all be home right now, but you had to make things difficult." Spider-Man spun a web over the doorway so they couldn't escape and webbed their feet to the floor. "Well, not too dificult, just annoying."

Back in his apartment, Peter thought, "Not bad, that only took half an hour. Gwen might not even be home yet. Maybe I can save the rest of night. I'll leave a message with her father that the cat I was supposed to tutor flaked out.-No, that I cancelled on him to be with her-and ask her to come back."

He dialed the number of the house Gwen shared with her father. After three rings, Gwen picked up the phone. "Hello"

"Hi." Peter took a deep breath and steeled himself for the conversation to come. Criminals were easy. Girlfriends were hard. Sometimes a little scary, too. "Gwen, I'm really sorry about before. I rescheduled the tutoring and..."

"Oh, I'm sorry Mr. Parker. I'm not really in the mood to reminisce about when we were dating. Try me some other time. Say, a few years after graduation."

"When did we break up," Peter asked himself. "Time for a new plan."

"Could I talk to your father? There've been some robberies in my neighborhood recently and he might know something about them."

"Oh, Peter, are you safe? Maybe you should get stronger locks put on the door and windows..." She caught herself beginning to weaken, "and lock yourself in. No human contact. Just the way you like it."

"Please, Gwen. It could be important."

"All right. All right. I'll get him. Hold on."

Half a minute later, he heard Captain Stacy's voice, "Yes, Peter? Gwen said you thought I could help you about some robberies?"

"Actually, sir, there was just one robbery earlier and Spider-Man took care of it."

"It's a good thing he was around, wasn't it?"

"Yes, I guess it was, but I'm not really asking about the robbery. It's Gwen. I just don't know what's happening between us. All I did was tell her that I'd forgotten a tutoring job for tonight and she's acting like everything's over. I thought you might be able to help me understand what's going on."

"Maybe I can. You and I both understand that you didn't have any choice tonight, that you cancelled your plans with Gwendolyne because of something important that you had to do," Captain Stacy paused for a second, and Peter wondered if the Captain knew what that "something important" really was. "but she doesn't see it like that. She's afraid, son, afraid that you're really trying to get rid of her. I think it has something to do with her mother"

"Her mother? Gwen never talks about her. Didn't she pass away a few years ago?"

"She did, and I miss her every day, but I've never told anyone the whole story, not even Gwen. Maybe I should have, but I thought it would be easier for her if she didn't know everything."


	2. When Did It All Go Wrong?

There was a sigh of resignation in Captain Stacy's voice that Peter had never heard before and it shocked him a bit. Despite the fact that Gwen's father was a bit elderly, walked with a cane, and had the occasional coughing fit, probably the result of years of smoking, any hint of frailty seemed out of place on George Stacy. He was confident, assured, thoughtful, possibly the strongest man Peter had ever known, but this was a new side of him. Peter didn't need his spider-sense to recognize the sound of a man trying to find the right words for something he'd rather leave unsaid. "If you don't want to talk about this," Peter said after a few moments of silence, "it's ok. I don't want to to intrude on something that should be kept in the family."

"Don't worry about that. To me, you are family. Despite what happened tonight, Gwen adores you and you've done a world of good for her. It's just... I've been avoiding these memories for a while."

"It was about six years ago. I had been working around the clock on a case for several months. There had been an unusal amount of insurance claims over car accidents, all with the same company, and almost all of those accidents were fatal. I was sure it wasn't a coincidence and I thought I was close to a breakthrough when Helen told me she was leaving me for another man.Maybe I deserved that. I had thought I was doing the right thing, but I was neglecting her and Gwen at the time. I tried to make it up to them, I really did, but I could only make so much time for my family, and that time was always spent with Gwen, never with Helen alone. That seemed logical at the time. Gwen was a 13 year old girl who needed her father. Helen was an intelligent adult. I was sure she'd understand. But, Peter, there's one thing you should never forget about women. When a woman loves you, never neglect her. No matter how intelligent she is, no matter how good your reasons are, it will break her heart and eat away at her until there's an unbearable emptiness inside her.That's what I did to Helen, and that's why she felt she had to leave her family."

"Of course, Gwen didn't take that well at all. She assumed it was her fault somehow. I can still hear her crying, 'Mommy, please stay. I promise I'll be good," even though, up to that time, she'd been a perfect angel. No man could have asked for a better-behaved, sweeter daughter than Gwen was as a child, but after Helen left, she began to change."

"How bad could she have been?" Peter asked. "Sure, she has a bit of a temper, but most of the time, she's really a doll."

"Oh, I know I've been lucky with her. It isn't as though she got involved with drugs or ended up pregnant. I know she'd never do anything like that. It was just that, well, the temper you mentioned was a lot more obvious and she was so willful. She started to ignore her curfew and when I said something, she'd just tell me that it wasn't important."

"The curfew?"

"All of it, she didn't care about the curfew, she didn't care if I was upset, she didn't care if I grounded her. Nothing mattered to her."

"Things started to get better around her Senior year of high school. I think the turning point was the previous summer. Our cleaning woman had found a pack of cigarettes in Gwen's room and I confronted her about it. At first, she wouldn't listen. She yelled that I was a hypocrite, that I smoked so why shouldn't she. I have to admit, that was a good point, but it wasn't just the cigarettes we were arguing about. She was losing control of her life, making herself old while she was still a young girl. I told her that, told her that it was a decision she could make later in life, but it wasn't one she was ready to make at sixteen, and I pointed out to her that she had always found my pipe disgusting, so it didn't make sense for her to take up the habit herself. She seemed to understand."

"Then, during her last year of high school, she got interested in her classes again, especially Chemistry. At first, I wondered if she wasn't just trying to learn how to make a bomb, but she really did enjoy the subject. She's a very intelligent girl, you know, and I think she liked having a mental challenge so she could think about something other than what happened with her mother. The anger and the moodiness was still there, but for the first time in a while, it wasn't all there was in her life. She really came out of it after the two of you became a couple. You've made my daughter happy again, Peter, and I'll always be grateful"

The image of Gwen Stacy as a mad bomber made Peter smile briefly but, other than that, he had been listening to Captain Stacy's story intently. It disturbed him a little that there was so much he didn't know about the woman he loved. Why hadn't she told him about this, he wondered. She could tell him anything and he would still adore her. Of course, Peter knew he didn't have the right to be too upset about this. After all, the secret he was hiding from Gwen was even bigger. That's when he thought, for the first time, that if he told Gwen that he was Spider-man, she might still love him. Sure, she thought Spider-man was "creepy," and she'd said that she didn't trust him, or any masked heros, that "he's on the right side now, but he could turn on us at any time, and no one could stop him," but, just maybe, her love for him was stronger than those feelings. The more Peter thought about what he and Gwen had, the more he was certain that she would accept his double life. Things were so wonderful that there was no way she wouldn't trust him.

Captain Stacy's voice interrupted Peter's thoughts. "There's one more part to the story. It's the part I've never told Gwendolyne. I still talked to Helen after she left. She'd call me occasionally to ask about Gwen and, after a few weeks, she told me that she'd made the biggest mistake of her life and wanted to come back to us. It was what I wanted more than anything, so I immediately said yes. I suppose that might have been naive and maybe I should have been at least a little worried that she'd leave me again, but Helen was the love of my life. I couldn't be that detached when it came to her."

"I wish I could have been. Helen was coming to see me when she was in the crash that took her life. When I broke the news to Gwen, I just told her that I'd heard the police report. I never said anything about us getting back together. If I had, Gwen might have blamed herself for Helen's death, thinking that if she hadn't wanted Helen to stay with us, she wouldn't have been in her car then and she wouldn't have been in the accident."

Captain Stacy paused for a moment, then continued in a softer voice, "I know Gwen would have felt that way, because that's exactly what I was thinking. If I hadn't said I wanted her back, Helen would still be alive."

Something clicked in Peter's mind when he heard about how Helen Stacy had died. It wasn't the tingle that he felt when someone was going to attack him, but it was a sense that something was wrong. "Mrs. Stacy died in a car accident? Didn't you say that the case you were investigating involved car accidents? What happened with that?"

"With everything that was happening, I couldn't focus on my work, so I handed it off to another investigator. He concluded that there was no case and the accidents really were accidents. The way Helen died was just a coincidence."

"Are you sure?"

"Trust me, Peter, if an old flatfoot like myself isn't suspicious, there's nothing to be suspicious about."

"Or you might be too close to the situation to see it," Peter thought, but it didn't seem like the right time to say anything - reliving those events must have been draining for Captain Stacy - so Peter kept his concerns to himself for the moment.


End file.
